Characterising Faults in Aspect-Oriented Programs: Towards Filling the Gap Between Theory and Practice

Ferrari, Fabiano Cutigi; Burrows, Rachel; Lemos, Otávio Augusto Lazzarini; Garcia, Alessandro; Maldonado, José Carlos

doi:10.1109/sbes.2010.11

Cited by 13 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Afterwards, we identified, grouped together and added to our taxonomy several fault types for AO software that have been described by other researchers [1][2][3][4][5]. Additionally, we included new fault types that can occur in programs written in AspectJ [7,12].…”

Section: Creating An Underlying Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, code evolution that causes pointcuts to break and duplicated crosscutting code due to improper concern refactoring. We used the taxonomy to classify 104 faults documented from three medium-sized AO systems [7]. The chart of Fig.…”

Section: Creating An Underlying Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…4 requires dynamic analyses of the woven code to help one identify (un)covered test requirements, since the aspect-base interactions cannot be clearly seem at the source code level. Even though current IDEs such as AJDT 7 provide the developer with hints about the relationship about aspects and the base code, understanding the behaviour of the woven application to decide about equivalence regarding semantics cannot be feasible based only on static information. On the other hand, as shown in Table 3, many mutants were automatically classified as equivalent.…”

Section: Covering and Analysing Test Requirementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ever since, the software testing community has been investigating ways of dealing with the challenges described by them. In summary, research on testing of AO programs (hereafter called AO testing) has been mainly concerned with: (i) the characterisation of fault types and bug patterns [2][3][4][5][6][7], (ii) the definition of underlying test models and test selection criteria [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] and (iii) the provision of automated tool support [11,14,16,[18][19][20][21][22]. In particular, structural-based and mutation-based testing have been on focus by several research initiatives [8,9,[11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Testing of aspect-oriented programs: difficulties and lessons learned based on theoretical and practical experience

et al. 2015

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Background: Since the first discussions of new challenges posed by aspect-oriented programming (AOP) to software testing, the real difficulties of testing aspect-oriented (AO) programs have not been properly analysed. Firstly, despite the customisation of traditional testing techniques to the AOP context, the literature lacks discussions on how hard it is to apply them to (even ordinary) AO programs based on practical experience. Secondly, and equally important, due to the cautious AOP adoption focused on concern refactoring, test reuse is another relevant issue that has been overlooked so far. This paper deals with these two issues. It discusses the difficulties of testing AO programs from three perspectives: (i) structural-based testing, (ii) fault-based testing and (iii) test set reuse across paradigms. Methods: Perspectives (i) and (ii) are addressed by means of a retrospective of research done by the authors' group. We analyse the impact of using AOP mechanisms on the testability of programs in terms of the underlying test models, the derived test requirements and the coverage of such requirements. The discussion is based on our experience on developing and applying testing approaches and tools to AspectJ programs at both unit and integration levels. Perspective (iii), on the other hand, consists of recent exploratory studies that analyse the effort to adapt test sets for refactored systems and the quality of such test sets in terms of structural coverage. Results: Building test models for AO programs imposes higher complexity when compared to the OO paradigm. Besides this, adapting test suites for OO programs to AO equivalent programs tends to require less effort than doing the other way around, and resulting suites achieve similar quality levels for small-sized aplications. Conclusions: The conclusion is that building test models for AO programs, as well as deriving and covering paradigm-specific test requirements, is not straightforward as it has been for procedural and object-oriented (OO) programs at some extent. Once you have test suites in conformance with programs implemented in both paradigms, the quality of such suited in termos of code coverage may vary depending on the size and characteristics of the applications under testing.

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Section: Creating An Underlying Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Creating An Underlying Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Covering and Analysing Test Requirementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Testing of aspect-oriented programs: difficulties and lessons learned based on theoretical and practical experience

et al. 2015

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“…References [4,31,32] generalize faults for general aspect-oriented programs and produced three groups of mutation operators. The mutation operators are grouped into pointcut descriptor (PCD), intertype declaration (ITD), and advices.…”

Section: Mutation Testing For Aspect-oriented Programsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Semantic Mutation Testing of Aspect-Oriented Programs

Ghani¹

2013

JSEA

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Aspect-oriented programs have received much attention from software testing researchers. Various testing techniques and approaches have been proposed to tackle issues and challenges when testing aspect-oriented programs including traditional mutation testing. In traditional mutation testing of aspect-oriented programs, mutants are generated by making small changes to the syntax of the aspect-oriented language. Recently, a new approach known as semantic mutation testing has been proposed. This approach mutates the semantics of the language in which the program is written. The mutants generated misunderstandings of the language which are different classes of faults. Aspect-oriented programming presents itself with different properties that can be further explored with respect to semantic mutation testing. This paper describes various possible scenarios that semantic mutation testing strategy might have particular value in testing aspect-oriented programs.

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Avoiding Code Pitfalls in Aspect-Oriented Programming

Alves

Figueiredo

Ferrari

2014

Programming Languages

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Abstract. Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is a maturing technique that requires a good comprehension of which types of mistakes programmers make during the development of applications. Unfortunately, the lack of such knowledge seems to represent one of the reasons for the cautious adoption of AOP in real software development projects. Based on a series of experiments, this paper reports a catalogue of code pitfalls that are likely to lead programmers to make mistakes in AOP. Each experiment required the aspectization (i.e. refactoring) of a crosscutting concern in one object-oriented application. Six rounds of the experiment provided us with the data of 80 aspect-oriented (AO) implementations where three crosscutting concerns were aspectized in three applications. We developed a prototype tool to warn programmers of the code pitfalls during refactoring activities.

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Characterising Faults in Aspect-Oriented Programs: Towards Filling the Gap Between Theory and Practice

Cited by 13 publications

References 28 publications

Testing of aspect-oriented programs: difficulties and lessons learned based on theoretical and practical experience

Testing of aspect-oriented programs: difficulties and lessons learned based on theoretical and practical experience

Towards Semantic Mutation Testing of Aspect-Oriented Programs

Avoiding Code Pitfalls in Aspect-Oriented Programming

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